Agentic AI platform for commercial real estate (CRE) lending – CarbonAI – has announced $12m in funding. The round was led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures.
CarbonAI brings reliable automation and time savings with purpose-built agents that run the core analytical work of a loan, from underwriting and due diligence to post-close monitoring.
CRE is a $20trn market in the US and most lending work still runs on spreadsheets and manual document review. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the industry faces a ‘wall of maturities’ as $875bn in commercial mortgages mature in 2026 – and loans are expected to require lender intervention as interest rates continue to rise.
CRE lending teams already spend an estimated $50bn annually to underwrite new and existing loans held on book and, increasingly, teams are not scaling to meet the challenge. As a result, lenders either slow their decisions or approve deals with less review than the risk requires.
CarbonAI’s long-horizon agents solve this resource crunch by automating analytical work in CRE lending – including underwriting, due diligence and quarterly surveillance.
“Josh and I spent the early years of our careers buried in the same manual work Carbon now automates. Lenders don’t need another chat window that they have to coach through every step.
“They need agents that already know the job, do it end to end consistently, and show their work, so their teams can spend their time on the judgment calls to make more, high-quality loans and protect their existing book.
“That’s the tool we needed when we were analysts, so it’s the one we built.”
Jeff Saul, Co-Founder and CEO, CarbonAI
CarbonAI agents extract and structure data from rent rolls, leases, financial statements and legal documents. There, they autonomously build the underwriting, draft the investment memo and flag risks for review.
Each output links back to its source document, and the agents route decisions that require human judgment to the lending team. After a loan closes, the same system monitors it continuously to proactively surface risks rather than waiting on a manual quarterly review.
After launching its first product suite in early 2025, CarbonAI helped its early customers save as much as 90% of time on core underwriting tasks like lease review, financial statement analysis and loan onboarding.
As a result, the company achieved seven figures of contractual revenue within six months of that launch and now counts among its customers some of the largest firms in CRE including debt funds, mortgage REITs, agency multifamily lenders and publicly traded financial institutions.
“Carbon was a clear choice and natural partner to us to automate due diligence collection – one of the most significant yet overlooked bottlenecks in underwriting. They won us over because they listen.
“Rather than pushing a solution in search of a problem, Jeff and the team took the time to understand our underwriting challenges and deliver a solution that actually fits our business.
“They ship fast, and their point of view on where automated CRE work is headed has been invaluable.”
Mordecai Rosenberg, Co-President, Greystone
Co-founders Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman began their careers underwriting and managing CRE loans at firms including Starwood Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Guggenheim. They went on to build Nativ, a CRE deal management platform that grew quickly to working with over 30 lenders across over $300bn of AUM by working with lenders’ native workflow (excel models, report formats) rather than replacing it, and sold it to Built, where both held leadership roles at the Series D stage company.
“When we first met Carbon, some of the top lenders in commercial real estate were already customers. Those lenders told us two things – First, generic tools don’t work in a business this complex, where the data is messy and the margin for error is close to zero, Second, they only wanted to work with people who came from their world.
“Jeff and Josh spent their careers in commercial real estate lending, then built and scaled the software they wish they had. That combination is why the best lenders trust them.”
Caroline Duffy, Partner, Cowboy Ventures
